My Books

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

My first book was titled Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision, and
explored a world I knew from growing up in an Italian American family, one
where common ailments (stomachache, headache, fever) were often attributed to mal occhio or “evil eye.” My point here
is not to revive that story, but to point out that the operating principle
behind mal occhio in our tradition
was envy: an outsider sees
something—a quality, an object, a trait—that he or she admires, and beneath that
open admiration lies a corrosive envy. The admiring person, evil eye cultures
believe, either desires to have that object (a beautiful baby, say) for him/
herself, or wishes it harm. Behind it all lies envy, supported by the fact that the evil eye complex, in Roman
times, was known simply as invidia,
the word for envy. One of the side effects of the evil eye belief was a
cultural inhibition on display, and on the individualism which leads to
boasting. In evil eye cultures (usually villages), it is more prudent to keep
one’s possessions and gifts under wraps, to downplay any good fortune one might
have, so as not to incite envy and the resultant harm from evil eye. Socially,
this tends to act as a check on runaway egos and tends to keep things, at least
overtly, more or less balanced.

Modern
societies, of course, pretend to be free of such superstitions, and indeed turn
them on their head, but in truth, our industrial societies are more shot
through with envy than we might suspect. We can see that this is the case by
looking at any number of TV commercials, where the possession of a new car or
any other shiny object is gazed at with wanting and pure envy by a neighbor. We
are all, as eager consumers, meant to envy those who have beautiful or
desirable objects (including women or babies) and to work hard to be able to
get them. Objects, that is, are desirable not to satisfy a need, but simply
because they appear to confer some magical quality on those who have them. The
well-known commercial in which Jessica Simpson (herself a desired object) gives
voice to her naked desire is one of the best cases ever made for this idea: She
extols the benefits of Direct TV broadcast on something she calls “1080i,” and
then adds the punchline: “I totally don’t know what that means, but I want it.”
What more needs to be said about American commerce and its mania for inciting
raw lust for objects or services consumers don’t really need?

This raw desire is
partly what Pankaj Mishra writes about in his fascinating book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present
(2017). For Mishra, the key concept driving the seemingly motiveless violence of
terrorists and mass murderers and groups like ISIS in our time, is what he terms
ressentiment. This French word
connotes something akin to the English ‘resentment,’ but with more overtones
and implications. Mishra quotes several well-known thinkers about this key
idea, beginning with Hannah Arendt, who describes ressentiment as “An existential resentment of other people’s being,
caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness…”
The French critic Rene Girard develops this further with his term ‘appropriative
mimicry’—desiring objects because the desires of others tell us that they are
something to be desired. This sounds like a primer for American advertising.
But Mishra explains Girard further as follows:

the
human individual is subject, after satisfying his basic needs, to ‘intense
desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he
desiresbeing, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems
to possess…If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being,
desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even
greater plenitude of being’ (66).

This is a key concept here. It is
not just objects themselves that are desired; it is being, a state of mind or emotion which is hard to define and
which masses of people feel but have no way of satisfying because they’re not
even sure what it is (like Jessica Simpson, who admits to having no idea what
it is she wants so much). All they know is that certain fortunate others seem to have it, and seem to have it because
they possess certain objects; and so, to get being, the envious masses focus
their desires on the objects or lifestyles of the elite.

There
are a few other key ingredients that contribute to the toxic stew of our time,
and Mishra traces them out at great length. Here, what’s important is to lay
them out briefly. First is the general idea in most modern cultures that all
are equal and therefore have the right and the capabilities to get anything
they desire. Of course, this is a myth but it is a myth that has been promoted
relentlessly since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution (see our
Declaration of Independence). What it leads to in modern societies is the
unlimited expectations that all modern populations exhibit—not just in advanced
societies, but now in developing cultures as well. And of course, modern media
exacerbate this situation with advertising and related media that are full of
images of apparently rich and satisfied westerners enjoying all the fruits of advanced
industrialism.

The
other key ingredient is the fact that, in the face of these almost unlimited
desires and aspirations, most people simply cannot satisfy them. Most people,
that is, are as powerless as insects in comparison to the elites in advanced
societies, and know that they are
powerless. They find this humiliating—as Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of
the first to articulate. The result is that we get individuals, and whole
societies, whole continents composed of envious and humiliated outsiders. These
are the masses of people who want and feel they deserve what others seem to
have, others who are conspicuously enjoying a wealth of possessions and a sense
of “being” that comprises their ultimate desire, but which is simply beyond
their reach. They can’t have it, and yet they are constantly goaded by what
they see in the media—this is literally the purpose of modern media, to instill
desire for useless goods in as many people as possible—to try to get it. And
this leads to envy of those who have it. Envy and powerlessness and ressentiment.

The
outcome of all this unsatisfied desire and powerlessness, in Mishra’s telling,
is the resort to violence. In a world where some few have multiple dwellings
and more goods than they know what to do with, and increasing capital to always
get more, those who are so powerless they have barely enough to survive are
eventually induced to do something.
But what is to be done? Where can all this desire be satisfied? Where can
something to change the world be found? And here is where demagogues come in.
Demagogues are those who, like many of the leaders in our world today (and many
more in the past) provide easy solutions to the powerlessness and frustration
of the masses. Mishra cites some of them: Narendra Modi in India; Vladimir
Putin in Russia; Recip Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; and of course, Donald Trump in
the United States. All use the same formula, one perfected by Hitler and
Mussolini (and D’Annunzio in Italy before him): they promise to bring the
nation or group to a power and glory that apparently reigned in the past. For
Mussolini, it was to restore Italians to the greatness of the Roman Empire. For
Putin, it’s to restore Russia to the superpower status of the Soviet Union. For
Trump, it’s to Make America Great again (by restoring a presumptive greatness
that reigned in the immediate post-World War II period.) And more than just
promising restored national greatness, the demagogues point out that those who stand
in the way of this greatness are not the real culprits, the power elites and
the system that favors them, but rather the scapegoats—the Kurds in Turkey or
the Muslims in India or the undocumented immigrants in America.Once these troublemakers are either expelled
or collared with draconian controls, so the promise goes, all the problems will
vanish. It is reminiscent, of course, of the classic scapegoats used by Hitler
and the Nazis, where all Germany’s troubles were attributed to the nefarious
workings of the Jews. And wherever there are scapegoats, there is the
corollary, the deflection of anger to the now-legitimated targets of violence.
For the real satisfaction for those who are powerless and humiliated and
envious lies, when all else fails as it always must, in violence.

Mishra
focuses both on those who, historically, promoted theoretical violence like
Nietzsche and Wagner in Germany and the Futurists like Marinetti in Italy, and
on the more recent devotees of violence for its own sake like Timothy McVeigh
(who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City), Ramzi Yousef (bombed the World
Trade Center in 1993), and Omar Mateen (massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in
Florida). They are the real exemplars of the anger that Mishra seeks to
document and understand: “For them the act of violence is all; they have no
vision of an alternative political reality on a global or even local scale,
like the one of a classless society” (292). That is to say, unlike even the
anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these
modern purveyors of violence—and those who join ISIS come instantly to
mind—seem to have no need for justifications or rationalizations for their
violence. Like those who drove airliners into the World Trade Center on 9/11,
the act of violence is sufficient unto itself. Mishra puts this in historical
context, citing the first aerial bombing of Libya by Italians in 1911, as
“confirm(ing) that the emerging New Man, theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel, and
empowered by technology, saw violence as
an existential experience—an end in itself, and perpetually renewable” (248).
That it kills innocents in no way diminishes its appeal, and may even enhance
it. In a sense, these killers have had enough of rationalizations and
justifications; all have failed them over time; every program for equality and
restitution has failed and ended in further powerlessness. Mishra puts it this
way:

Simply defined, the energy and
ambition released by the individual will to power far exceed the capacity of
existing political, social and economic institutions. Thus, the trolls of
Twitter as much as the dupes of ISIS lurch between feelings of impotence and
fantasies of violent revenge (341).

For certain people whose envy and
frustration are great enough, this can sooner or later lead to the fatal
decision to turn fantasy into reality, as with the suicide killers of ISIS,
whom Mishra reads as follows:

In all cases they move from feelings
of misery, guilt, righteousness and impotence to what Herzl [Theodor, a founder
of Zionism] called, admiringly, the ‘voluptuousness of a great idea and of
martyrdom’: a grand vision of heroic self-sacrifice in which a life of freedom
can finally be achieved by choosing one’s mode of death (295).

So there it is. In
a world where freedom and self-determination are promised to everyone, but one
in which millions are prevented from ever reaching anything like freedom but
are subjected to constant humiliation instead, the feelings generated can lead
to the heroic vision of the martyr’s death; the suicide bomber who kills innocents and
may even be aware that his act will fail, like all previous ones, to bring
about change, but who at least can achieve the freedom of choosing his own
death.

Thus
does envy lead to ressentiment and ressentiment, in a surprising number of
cases, lead to the violence we are becoming accustomed to. And thus does our
modern world, impelled by a capitalist system that depends on inciting envy in millions
of consumers, come to resemble, more than we might imagine, the overheated
world of the Italian village. The problem—and it is serious—lies in the fact
that so far, the modern world has no safety valve like mal occhio to mitigate the toxic effects of all this supercharged
envy. There is no set of practices to tamp down the rampant individualism and
desire that seem to be the inevitable product of our diseased economic/political
system. Instead, the opposite is true: the gulf between the few rich and the masses
of the poor engendered by global capitalism is driven ever wider, in the
process dramatizing the open wounds that must eventually lead to explosions
among those left out; to violence among the marginalized, who are growing more
and more marginalized and enraged by the day. And to the rise of more and more
demagogues who seek to divert that legitimate anger onto convenient scapegoats
for their own self-aggrandizement. Whether, in this century, it will take the
kinds of bloodbaths that erupted in the 20th century for people to realize they
are being led down a fool’s path to armaggedon, is still to be decided; but with
everything conspiring to drive envy and humiliation ever higher, the signs do
not look good.

Monday, July 3, 2017

The above Italian phrase is
apparently what Italian immigrants, unfamiliar with English and its sounds,
thought they heard for the Fourth of July: il
forte gelato, which means something like ‘strong ice cream.’ It makes no
sense, but linguistic transpositions are often like this. The foreign speaker,
mispronouncing the ‘th’ sound unfamiliar to Italians, hears something, ‘fort,’
that sounds like forte in his own
language and thinks it’s a cognate that’s just as crazy as the new language
itself. Or perhaps, seeing lots of people eating ice cream on the Fourth of
July, thought ‘forte gelato’ made
some kind of new world sense.

We’re
all like this in a way. We hear “Fourth of July,” and we get images of holidays
from our childhoods, with red, white and blue buntings and parades with
marching bands in which we may have taken part, and outings to the beach with
hot dogs and beer, and of course, thrilling fireworks displays at night. With
perhaps some secret stash of firecrackers to be set off sometimes days or weeks
before the actual holiday, but surely that night to frighten sisters or old
people on the block or to blow up cans or unfortunate insects.

All
these are symbols, of course, meant to evoke the fourth day of July, Independence
Day, to commemorate something having to do with men in braids and wigs and
funny coats who put their “John Hancock” to some old document on that day long
ago (though, as it turns out, July 4 was the day only some delegates signed, many
others signing in early August of 1776). And it had something, we recall
vaguely, to do with independence. American Independence. Which made all its
signers liable to be hanged, for they were allegedly declaring allegiance to a politics and philosophy
that was so radical it would surely bring on war with Great Britain.

Except that this
is not quite the case. As history tells us, the colonies in 1776 were already at
war with the British. The Boston Tea Party (May 1773) and the battles of
Lexington and Concord (April 1775) had already taken place. The English King,
George III, was in fact quite well aware that the colonies were fighting
against British rule, and had formally declared in February 1775 that his Massachusetts
colony was in a state of armed rebellion. This was then followed by the first
shots of the war (the shots heard round the world) at Lexington and Concord when
British troops marched from Boston to put down the rebellion. Open conflict
with accompanying deaths had already started, therefore, and was well under way
by June and July of 1776 when the Second Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia. So why did the leaders meet, and why did they feel such a
pressing need to formally declare their Independence?

According to a new Smithsonian article by historian Larrie
D. Ferreiro (smithsonianmag.com, June 28, 2017), the meeting and drafting of
the Declaration was not meant to declare war at all; nor was it even addressed
to the King of England. Rather, it was primarily addressed to two other
monarchs, those ruling France and Spain. And the Declaration was meant to serve
as a plea with those two countries to aid the American colonies in their fight against
England. The situation was critical. The colonies were losing because they were
fighting the greatest military power in the world and were woefully short of
ammunition, gunpowder and supplies, and had no navy or artillery as the British
did. As Ferreiro notes, “America needed allies—and it needed them soon.” The
problem was, as American leaders well knew, France and Spain would not and
could not interfere unless the rebellious colonies could show that they were
more than colonies—that they were an
independent nation. If that were the case, then both France and Spain would
be glad to join a legitimate war against their common enemy, England. Thus the
case for the Declaration of Independence. It was in essence a letter to France
and Spain, saying that since “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to
be, Free and Independent States,” the two European powers should, and could
legally, join them in their war with England. The timing, Ferreiro shows,
demonstrates this: the Declaration was approved by the Congress on Thursday
July 4, and a copy was placed on a fast ship to France the very next Monday to
get it to both the French and Spanish governments as soon as possible, so they
could act (which they soon did, with devastating effect).

With this, we see
that the Declaration of Independence was not
primarily an announcement of a new type of government, a new mode of being
governed, a new mode of being, as we have always been taught. It was a
statement that the American colonies were not simply rebels in a dispute with
their colonial masters, but rather a new nation that could legitimately be
aided by other nations which also were rivals to Great Britain. And what this
means is that, in a way, we Americans, most of us, are as misinformed about the
Declaration and its celebration as Italian immigrants who called it forte gelato—a holiday having to do with
ice cream. The Declaration, that is, is not so much a declaration of the
reigning principle of a new way of life, a life of total independence and
freedom; it is a reassertion of a much older one. It is an assertion or rather
an admission that all nations, all
peoples, need aid and cooperation from other nations. An assertion that no one
nation—nor, for that matter, any one individual, one family, one state, one species—can go it alone. We are all related, all interconnected,
all in need of each other. No matter how glorious the language or how ringing
our declarations—especially in these strange days in our republic when we have
a President vowing that we are for ourselves only, that it’s America for
Americans only and fuck the rest of the world—no matter. The truth is that from
the very beginning of our signature document and founding declaration, the
United States of America has always needed help, allies, partners in the
project to make itself a new nation in a more interdependent world. And for that,
we can be grateful; and celebratory; and
determined that, regardless of the jingoists who shout and scream for America
the One and Only, this nation, like every other nation, will always recognize
its ongoing need for the mutual respect, esteem, and, yes, aid of many many others.

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About Me

Lawrence DiStasi has worked as a writer, editor, teacher and historian since graduating from Dartmouth College (BA) and New York University (ABD). He has taught literature and composition at Gettysburg College, the University of California at Berkeley, and most recently in the Fall Freshman Program at UC Berkeley Extension. Since 1994, he has been project director of the historical exhibit, Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were "Enemy Aliens," shepherding it to more than fifty sites nationwide, and spearheading the movement it generated to pass "The Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act", signed into Public Law #106-451 by President William Jefferson Clinton. His published books include: MAL OCCHIO: The Underside of Vision (North Point Press: 1981), Dream Streets: The Big Book of Italian American Culture (Harper & Row: 1989), and Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (Heyday Books: 2001). He lives in Bolinas, CA.